Marketing is changing. The way we marketed 10 years ago seems ancient based on the system, process, and operations available today.

Yet, marketers today are challenged to justify budgets, keep up with the more than 6,000 technologies, and speed up the sales process. How do you do that? Well, in our conversation with Josh Wagner, of LeadMD, we explore some of the challenges for marketers today.

In this episode, Josh and Kyle discuss:

What does the recent M&A activity mean for MOPs and SOPs teams?

Best of Breed vs All-in-One Software – What to choose?

Creating a business case for marketing software.

How to use technology for ABM pilots?

What can we expect in the coming years from marketing, sales, and technology?

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TRANSCRIPT

Kyle Hamer: (00:04) Welcome to the summit, the podcast where we bring your knowledge and insights from industry leaders and professionals. No fluff, no double digit overnight growth schemes. We’re having real conversations with real people and today our special guest is Josh Wagner from lead MD. Josh, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks Kyle. Great to be here or glad to have you. Josh, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Josh Wagner: (00:26) Well, I am a long time sales and marketing professional, probably as young as I look. I’ve got 20 years under my belt doing both sales and digital marketing and I grew up despite my Pinchot for poking fun at marketing technology. I actually grew up in marketing technology, was a early adopter of Marquetto in the late part of the two thousands and uh, realized that there was actually a better way than just cold calling, smiling, dialing and, and making your way through the phone book. So super happy to talk about some of those things with you.

Kyle Hamer: (01:00) That’s awesome. Today I think we’re going to spend a little bit of time talking about the state of marketing technology and how it applies to sales. And then overall what we see happening with software, there’s a lot of merger and acquisition stuff happening. And then ultimately, you know, somebody like yourself is seeing what this is doing to teams on the front line. So, you know, just kind of starting us off here. What is it that you’re seeing happening related to the technologies?

Josh Wagner: (01:26) Well, it’s interesting that you started off with that acquisition piece of it. And it’s funny when you, when you think about how these acquisitions all come about, right? You, you rewind to kind of the Genesis of when all of these things really picked up steam and we’ll say that the early marketing automation players got all of this started, right? Um, what we’ll say Marquetto which was where I started. So Marquetto solve this problem of nurture, lead scoring, providing insights to sales, all these things, right? And then as people got excited and started implementing and doing stuff, they found all these gaps in the things that Marketo doesn’t do. So someone from Marquetto spins off and creates a company and this company is designed to fill this specific gap that Marketo doesn’t feel. And then that just extrapolates and you get derivatives of all of these different companies that are basically gap fillers, right?

Josh Wagner: (02:28) So that’s why the MarTech landscape is literally as big as it is. You see these 6,000 companies, I bet you two thirds of them are gap fillers. It’s a spin off of another company that’s going a gap for that product. The thing that they didn’t do, and the problem with that, if you rewind it back to like the company and the people buying this stuff is these spinoffs get bought by a person who felt that pain. It gets siloed many times. It’s not a huge ticket purchase. So it gets pulled into a small team. It never gets involved. Sales never gets involved, you know, it just becomes the siloed thing and then all of a sudden you’ve got this tech stack that’s super bloated. You’ve got cross-functionality now what you were trying to do is fill gaps. Now you’ve got all these things overlapping because as it turns out, when you put something in market, there’s just a gap filler on its own.

Josh Wagner: (03:23) It’s not going to generate enough sales to continue that growth. So you start tacking stuff on, Oh, we’re a predictive company, but we’re also a customer data platform. But we’re also an attribution platform. But we’re also this, we’re also that. So every point solution has to start moving towards this platform play to make themselves interesting. And you just get a bunch of jumbled up garbage, bloated tech stack in which companies are not seeing the value in because there’s no connectivity. And I think that’s the biggest thing that you’re going to see as things trend forward is that idea of connectivity,

Kyle Hamer: (04:01) which is lost right now when you talk about the idea of connectivity, I think so there’s a couple of things that you, you mentioned there Josh, that I think are really interesting because you talked about point fillers or you know, derivatives and fit in specific areas. And um, in the software space that’s usually taking the best of breed approach. Like, well, I can get a little bit of this and we’ll get together. But then there’s also this new concept of all in one platform really I think driven a lot by Salesforce and their um, their Salesforce development and their apps. And I mean the, the Genesis of what Salesforce was when it first came out, right? Salesforce was well acting goldmine really don’t want to go online. So we’re going to be the online version of a CRM. And then that expanded into, well there’s all these custom things people want to do, so let’s let them build their own integration points or custom objects or custom functionality and flow inside of Salesforce, which led into this entire development platform. Is there anybody in the marketing space that’s following the same footsteps or kind of headed that direction or is there, are we really all still been holding back to the almighty Salesforce and CRM? Well,

Josh Wagner: (05:15) I mean that’s an interesting question because you could go a couple of different routes. I think in the, in the big player space, they have to go the platform route because it’s the only way to continue to acquire, right. Okay. I’m Adobe and I acquire Marketo. Am I acquiring that platform or am I acquiring a segment of the customer of the market that I’m not strong in? It’s as much that as it is anything else, right? So the Salesforces, the Microsofts, the Adobes SAP, the big players are going to have to continue to acquire so that they can have this platform play that is this all in one so that they could continue to attract other pieces of the business. Now in the marketing space, I think Adobe’s probably your closest, I remember a year ago when the acquisition chatter was really starting to fire up, right? And as one of Marketo’s top partners really like, Aw man, if, if more cattle gets acquired by Salesforce or SAP, like we’re screwed.

Josh Wagner: (06:21) I mean it’s just, it’s not going to get innovated on anymore. They’re not marketing companies. It’s just going to suck. Right. I think for a big acquisition like that, for someone like us, a small niche service company player on a platform, that was the best case scenario because Adobe, Adobe’s a marketing company, right? I mean they were built on consumer based marketing products that were sold in boxes. I remember when I started my first company, you know, I bought the box for Photoshop, I bought the box for dream Weaver, I bought, you know what I mean? And now does that concept is the people buying the stuff now they don’t even know what the hell you’re talking about. What’s a box? So, Oh, that’s a long winded way of saying I think that the big guys will continue to be big and we’ll have to innovate through acquisition, right?

Josh Wagner: (07:08) And acquire new customers through acquisition and new markets through acquisition. What does an opportunity goes back to something that you said prior, which is stitching together solutions. There may actually be opportunities for people to make some hay in the non enterprise mid-market with actually stitching together solutions that might be more effective than plugging in a platform like Marketo or Salesforce or something like that. I’ll give you an example. So what we find oftentimes is that data is the biggest silo and lack of connectivity within an organization, right? So you’ve got disparate data sources all across. You’ve got ERP, CRM, website, back end product. If you’re a product company, you’ve got a whatever, right? You’ve got all these different data sources. If you’re in healthcare, you’ve got a EMS system, you know, whatever. Yeah, and stitching all that data together into something that’s meaningful and gives you a true view of what your customer actually looks like is really, really challenging.

Josh Wagner: (08:12) So for a big company that’s already down that path of siloed data, a lot of different systems, you know, the whole scenario we talked about before, it’s going to happen, it’s going to be some big overhauls, it’s going to be the next wave of transformation. You know, we’ve talked about digital transformation. I think data transformation is probably gonna be the next wave across marketing and sales. But for the smaller companies, let’s say now, okay, let’s be nimble, right? We want to build a data infrastructure that makes sense now. So let’s look at potentially a customer data platform that can give us a full circle view of what’s going on. We can do identity resolution, we can do customer stitching, we do this and we do that. And from this center of this foundation, everyone’s like, Oh, data is the foundation of everything, but nobody takes action on that.

Josh Wagner: (08:59) They just like to say it. And then when you come in and say, all right, well we need to fix your day. They’re like, ah, yeah, I mean we do, but can’t we just, you know, run some more campaigns or something? Sure. So I think what you could see happening is create the center around data, truly foundational center around data and create point solutions as endpoints to the data, right? You want to do email a scale. I mean, to be perfectly honest with you, if you’ve got a database of 50 million people, Marquetto is not a great solution for you. They’ll say otherwise, but it’s not the right solution. There could be, there could be something else. It could be a way cheaper solution that’s just really good at sending high introductional email. And for that use case, we’re going to plug that into our data infrastructure, right?

Josh Wagner: (09:44) We want to do display advertising and end and push people to digital. Well, there could be that as a part of a big platform but there could be a niche player that’s very good at that and they are really good at taking audiences and pushing at scale to that. So let’s plug that in, right? And you can start to see this hub and spoke model almost like Southwest airlines. You know everyone else got the hub and spoke, but Southwest has the point solution, right? Where you could go with this model where we make data, the foundation and we do plug in the best of breed solution as endpoints for all the different tactical things we want to do in marketing and sales and that could have some legs. I don’t see that happening tomorrow, but enterprises are going to go through some serious hiccups with the, with the data orchestration piece of it, they’re going to do it, they have the money to do it.

Josh Wagner: (10:34) I’m getting the executive team buy off on the level of money it’s really going to take to do it. It’s going to take time, but you’re starting to see it happen like you really are. The conversations are happening, building out the use cases, the business cases for it are starting to happen. It’s really positive momentum. But if you’re not embedded in that already and you’ve got an opportunity to, you know, start fresh as a mid-market smaller company and you’re already in a cycle with a big established player, maybe it’s an opportunity to think about it a little bit differently.

Kyle Hamer: (11:04) It’s interesting that you bring that up. A couple of weeks ago we had um, Mark Skiles who is working, um, he works in data is a basically a fractional CEO, chief digital officer and he was talking about a project that he was working on for a really large, um, genome in the agriculture, um, company, a company really large in the ag space and dealing with the data silos. And he was talking about the process they had to go through for, for hygiene and governance and you know, inner polarity and connectivity between what’s going on in the R and D versus what’s happening in operations or finance and over into sales and like all of these different silos. Well, it’s interesting to hear you talk about is, is it’s like, well normally players like Marquetto a Loquat, you’re SAP, those guys go to the enterprise first and that’s where they get a foothold.

Kyle Hamer: (11:57) Yeah. But they’re so far entrenched in the organization that for them to make this switch is, is really challenging. It’s almost easier for a mid size or even a small, like you must have better data in the mid size to a small business and what’s really going on inside of the business from a metrics and stuff that matters than you do at an enterprise level. So when you talk about leveraging point solutions, how does a, how does a business owner or a business leader, somebody who’s kind of in charge of these things, how do they begin to start looking at what they have and say, well, do I need a CDP or w w when do I start to need to make these decisions or, or, or look to do differently? What’s typically the pain that you see that’s forcing the change in behavior?

Josh Wagner: (12:44) Well, the pain is squarely comes down to reporting and reporting for the board. I mean more and more acquisitions are happening. We just talked about that. But PE is very active right now, uh, in the MarTech space. And you’re seeing even with, you know, not even just MarTech vendors, but companies that are kind of those customers as well, where PE is taking an active role, they’re coming in and their view of marketing is so narrow. It’s, it’s all right, you better turn on the leads and I want that lead report, this and that. So what happens is the board wants reporting and they want to see impact and they want to see leads and they want to see what’s driving the most leads. Now, as a new CMO that got brought in, whether it’s by the board or somebody else, your first job is to educate and help the board understand that that’s not marketing, right?

Josh Wagner: (13:45) Marketing is not just leads and what channels for writing the most leads, because for the most part, those books don’t know a lot about marketing. So the CMO has a great opportunity to educate the marketplace, right? But part of that education comes more accountability and you need to be willing to take that on your shoulders and provide the board with reporting that actually matters. Okay, here’s what I’m doing. I did a data analysis that says these are the people I’m targeting, here’s why I’m targeting them and these are the things that we’re going to do to start to drive pipeline support, the sales team and ultimately revenue. So if you’re a mid sized company and you find yourself in that situation first back into what are the reporting outcomes that you need to report into who and why. Right. And then work backwards from there. That’s where I would start is, is who’s asking for it. Right.

Kyle Hamer: (14:42) Well I mean that’s really interesting when you talk about when we moved from MNA and what’s happening into the space to how that’s actually impacting inside the boardroom. What is, what has caused the shift from being a, well, you know we just need more leads and focusing on bottom of the funnel activities to, you know, the whole mechanism that is marketing and trying to report on it. Like, is it, is it the evolution of marketing mix modeling? Is it, is it the evolution of, of software in general? Is it boiling down to, Hey, we can quantify things that we couldn’t before? Like what’s, what’s really pushing behind this shift? [inaudible]

Josh Wagner: (15:22) so I actually think that this is something that MarTech got right, right. This drive towards, uh, was it John Miller, Phil Fernandez from Marquetto who, who said marketing now has a seat at the revenue table. Like that line in itself, I feel like it’s propelled marketing into this place of you can’t just be pretty pictures and brand pretty pictures and brand needs to be supported and substantiated by something. So I actually feel like that’s something that MarTech got right. Really driving that coal idea of okay, all this stuff is out there. How do we funnel it into one place and look at, okay, we can see some things are performing better than others and not even some things are performing from an acquisition side better than others, but something suck from an acquisition standpoint. But really do a great job mid bottom of funnel of converting into revenue.

Josh Wagner: (16:24) Well, that’s interesting. We’ve never really thought about that before. Is that marketing’s job? It is now, right? We never thought about anything more than leads, acquisition ads, anything like that. 2025 30 years ago. Right? Well now if you’re going to run up, I think you commented on a close the other day I put on ABM if you know, companies always want to run a pilot for something, right? Uh, running an ABM pilot, I urge everyone to stay as far away as possible from running an ABM pilot on net new acquisition to close revenue like [inaudible]. If you’re running ABM, chances are it’s a long hefty sales cycle with big numbers attached to it, right? Go fine. A cohort of bottom of funnel mid funnel accounts that are stuck and run your ABM pilot there because it’s a faster path to impact. And just that thought process alone puts marketing in a way different light with an executive audience then they’ve probably ever thought about before, Oh, we’re not talking about leads. What are we talking about here? We’re talking about generating revenue for you with a whole bunch of people who know who you are, you’re talking to, but they’re not getting over the line and this is how we can help support you in that and your sales organization. That’s a different conversation. And like I said before, I think the Genesis of all that was MarTech exposing us to different stuff. So

Kyle Hamer: (17:52) what does that mean? Your typical, you touched on it briefly, brand and being able to quantify it. What does this mean for the new, the new age of moniker marketer? They’ve got this, the series of technology that’s in front of them in the majority of people have historically been communicators, right? Like I got a comms degree and I write and I’m in marketing and maybe I’m in an industrial space in manufacturing or here in Houston we’ve got a lot of energy where they’ll have small marketing teams. One, two, three people. Most of them are internal comms, a little bit of PR, but for the most part they’re just writers. What is the change of taking that seat from communications and now moving into revenue? What does that change for what the skills then the new set of marketers need to be effective?

Josh Wagner: (18:40) So we talked about this a little bit when you were on my podcast actually, which is the ability to have a business conversation, right? And we talked about it in the context of salespeople, but it’s no different, right? You look across the C suite and the CMOs still has by far the shortest tenure of any of its peers in the C suite. CEO, CFO are crushing. I mean they’re, they’re the longest by far. Uh, COO and CIO are a close second. And then like it’s a cliff, the COO and the cliff is, you’re not talking to me about business stuff. Everybody else is looking at spreadsheets and ledgers, profit margins, revenue cost allocation, like they’re looking at the business side of it. And marketing’s not coming with that angle. So if your track is to be a CMO, you better learn how to wrap what you’re doing into the business context, right?

Josh Wagner: (19:41) If you want to be a communicator or a traditional marketer, there’s still a place for you in marketing. That stuff still has to happen. Um, we need marketing needs, great writers. They need great communicators. They need all the things right. You can’t not do, you can’t do marketing without them. But like I said, if your path is to project the profession of marketing, hire and get into the C suite, you have to learn to speak language. And there’s a good example that we got exposed to our CMO actually did a podcast with a, or an interview with Allocadia, their head of marketing and they’re head of marketing offs actually. And they ran something that I’d never heard of before, which was marketing ops and revenue ops rolled up to the CFO.

Josh Wagner: (20:33) And the CFO said, listen, I live in a world of data. We have data everywhere, spreadsheets, numbers, this, that ledgers. When I peeled back the curtain on the amount of data marketing deals, I was blown away. So now when something needs to get funded to fix marketing ops, it gets funded. It has visibility at the C suite is someone that says this data stuff is important. It’s a problem. There’s a lot of it. And if we don’t get our arms around it, it’s costing us money. And they know the exact financial impact of it because it’s a business conversation now. It’s not just a a marketing conversation. And that was super insightful to me because I think that’s where the marketing team has to go. They have to be able to go to the CFO’s office, knock on the door and say, man, our ads or are not performing.

Josh Wagner: (21:31) But I think it’s a deeper issue. And that deeper issue is a data issue and well, what do you mean by that? Well, let me show you and really be able to dive into the cost of bad data. The cost of running bad-ass, the cost of just buying lists, the costs, you know, whatever it may be that we, the bad practices we do in marketing, take that up a level. Right. And I think that’s where the marketer can start to propel themselves higher into the C suite and extend their tenure in the CCU for those that are making it there. I think that’s [inaudible]

Kyle Hamer: (22:05) I think, I think that’s valuable for people that are listening to think about what kind of the next steps are.

Josh Wagner: (22:10) You know, when I, uh, when I was, uh, in marketing leadership

Kyle Hamer: (22:15) and an organization, we were spending close to 35% of our annual budget on,

Kyle Hamer: (22:22) So whether it was, um, whether it was Marquetto or it was the, you know, the, the tool that we were using to track Yesware shores, the border, almost 35% of our annualized budget was spent on [inaudible]

Kyle Hamer: (22:44) we’d understand if the dollar we’re spending is, is helping us acquire somebody that’s net new or if it’s being used to retain the folks that we currently have. And what’s the influence of those dollars?

Josh Wagner: (22:54) Either way, some tools are really good for tracking growth into net new and some are actually good at tracking upsell, cross sell. Right. And, and when we’ve looked at, we pulled that one spreadsheet,

Kyle Hamer: (23:05) which was our, uh, our program configuration and campaign alignment matrix. So where did the lead come from and are we, or how are we doing our attribution model for,

Kyle Hamer: (23:29) And we pull this out. We showed it to them and they were like, well, what explained this to him? And about 10 minutes into it, the CEO, his eyes rolled back the back of his head. He’s like, okay,

Josh Wagner: (23:38) to your point, you guys have a lot that you’re tracking. We don’t fully appreciate that when we get the report that says you got a hundred

Kyle Hamer: (23:46) leads from this paid ad, right? We only converted $3 of them. All of those a hundred leads that we paid for, maybe 50 of them were already customers.

Kyle Hamer: (24:00) executives at the business level don’t necessarily appreciate as marketing departments are parsing data and sharing information and trying to bring to light what’s really happening

Josh Wagner: (24:09) with every dollar that goes in. There’s been a misnomer for years. Um, it’s, it’s become a lot of folklore, which is

Kyle Hamer: (24:18) 50% of every dollar I spend on marketing is wasted. You just don’t know which 50, I just don’t know what 50 I’m going to buy MarTech. Tell me what 50% are wasting and stop spending it.

Kyle Hamer: (24:31) Tell me, tell me how that’s applying or playing out today as, as you see it like it’s, do we still have, are we still beholding to that or is MarTech changing the state?

Josh Wagner: (24:40) The landscape of our dollars, uh, MarTech as I like to say is and should be an enabler, right? So it’s not a substitute for sounded better market strategy. It’s not a substitute for a really good process. It’s not a substitute for your relationship with your counterparts in sales. It’s, it’s not a substitute for any of those things. It’s an enabler of all of those things. So if you were to look at any of those systems as a, as you’re going through an evaluation to say, Hey, I really need to understand what 50% is working and what’s not. First take a step back and say, is that the problem I’m really trying to solve? Right? Is that what the board is asking before? Is that what’s important and, or am I just trying to play? Which you find in attribution a lot, which I think attribution has value, but where it doesn’t have value is when it’s a credit game and you hear people say this, like, all right, I want attribution.

Josh Wagner: (25:45) Awesome. I’m excited for you. What do you want to do with it? Well, I want to figure out what I’m doing is bringing in the leads, what, who’s doing what I’m doing, I gotta, I gotta show them that, that we’re actually doing something when in fact it shouldn’t be a credit game. It should be closer to what you’re saying, which is I need to figure out which 50% is performing and which 50% is not, so that I can pull the levers in the right direction and tilt that scale in our favor. Right. So if you’re thinking about how you go to market and you’re thinking about tactically what you’re doing and you’ve got this holistic plan and you’re trying to put the business outcomes first, then yes, MarTech can help you figure those things out. But oftentimes MarTech is looked at as a scapegoat, as a magic bullet, as all these other things that is really not intended to be. It’s not the solution to the problem. It’s a, it’s you come up with the solution and the MarTech should enable you to get to that end game. I don’t know if I directly answered your question, but,

Kyle Hamer: (26:56) so, so I have a couple more. I’m just curious. Um, what is it you see where the majority of MarTech liens when you start, when you, when you started more tech was applied for what customer growth up sell, cross sell or was it applied mostly for net new customer acquisition? What were, how was marketing being positioned 15 years ago, MarTech being positioned 15 years ago versus how we’re seeing it being leveraged into our position today?

Josh Wagner: (27:26) Well, I think that positioning is part of the problem in the first place because if you, I hate to keep going back to like the early days of marketing automation, but they really kind of propelled this whole thing in the B2B space, right? Like B to C is ahead of the game, so I’m really not even there and B to C is so much about acquisition. There is buyer journey, there’s attribution, there’s all that kind of stuff. But in the context of a B2B MarTech, you look at marketing automation and you look at the disconnect between what executives think about marketing and what marketing automation really is intended to do. There’s a major disconnect right there, right? Like to this day I still have people talk to me about, okay, I need to implement marketing automation. And everything they say from there is all about acquisition. Oh, I have a whole lot of time out.

Josh Wagner: (28:16) Do you realize that marketing automation is not going to help you with acquisition whatsoever? And I w w what are you talking about? Like it’s after acquisition, acquisition happens, what do we do the rest of the way? That’s the most simplistic way to put it, but it’s how did we acquire them? What do we do with them once we acquire them? What did we learn about them after we acquired them? And they start doing things right? Like that’s what marketing automation is. So that whole perception of you know, what marketing’s function is and it goes back to what we were talking about earlier, like I think marketing’s function to executives is just an acquisition and we need to teach them that it’s, it goes beyond acquisition and really the entire buyer journey. And that’s where again, the new CFO and if you read all these interviews that come out with CMOs on LinkedIn and whatnot, that’s the thing that the good ones are trying to figure out. They’re trying to figure out how do I own the entire buyer journey? How do I understand it? How do I aggregate data around it so that I can make smart decisions? And then how do I bring that up to the rest of the Seasuite to say this is what we need to be doing and this is how we impact the business. Like, that’s a very, very simplistic way to put it.

Kyle Hamer: (29:30) Well, I liked the way you answered that because one of the things that I see that I feel like Mark MarTech did a poor job early on and you can credit this to um, you know, several, several very creative strategies around trying to reinvent the marketing game, putting technology behind it, right? HubSpot’s invention of the inbound game and then kind of claiming that space made marketing automation really feel more like it was about acquisition. Automation. Automation doesn’t really happen until you hit submit or automate anything until after somebody fills out a form or picks except a phone. All right. So, um, it’s, it’s, it’s interesting that you segmented that. One of the other things I think is a, is a common misnomer is that marketing automation tools can’t be used actually groom and grow population. So a lot of groups will just use it in the buyer’s journey of, of known prospect to sale the first time, but then completely abandoned any sort of methodology or a utilization of the tools to cross sell, upsell, continue to stay in front of their customers. On a regular basis, which has led to a unique point. Solutions, right? These little derivatives being introduced to the market as, Oh, we’re a marketing engagement platform or we’re at, we’re a customer engagement platform.

Kyle Hamer: (30:56) So two questions here. One with, with the, the, the further fracturing of the technology. Will marketing technology ever get branding right? Where we talk about what it is you’re really doing from the marketing technology side and to how will the disruptors of artificial intelligence and other things like data policy, privacy policies like we’re seeing in CC CCPA and we saw GDPR, how will those things influence the next five years?

Kyle Hamer: (31:29) MarTech, sales and marketing alignment. And what we see in the, you know, in the B2B, well

Josh Wagner: (31:38) we’ll start with the, the concept of branding of what the technology does and it really, it makes me immediately think of account based marketing and ABM and the two to three year buzz that that moniker had, right? And people were just like, Oh my God, I have to do ABM and [inaudible] okay, great. I’m excited about that. Let’s do some ABM. And so the immediate lean for peoples and companies like us is, all right, let’s understand your data. Let’s look at your customer segmentation profiles. Dig deep into your buyer personas and buyer processes. Let’s understand how that maps to very individualized touchpoints across those selected accounts that we feel are the best fit. What behaviors are we looking for? What behaviors are we driving and how can we do that? Not a scale, but how can we do that very personalized for a unique subset of, and everything I just said just like in one ear out the other like, no, no, no, I wanna I wanna I want to buy this tool and do this so I can do ABM but isn’t that, isn’t that marketing one Oh one which is you have the people that you will serve, but then you also have your target accounts.

Josh Wagner: (32:58) Right? It feels like to me like you should’ve been doing ABM to a degree all along. Exactly. ABM is just good marketing. Right? But the moniker made it seem like it was something else. So now fast forward to what’s hot right now. To your point. Customer marketing is pretty hot right now. The idea of focused on the customer and really they should be the center of the universe and tailor everything from acquisition through cross-sell, upsale around the customer. I think it’s getting closer, right? Because all this stuff I said about ABM when I say that in today’s world of customer marketing, people were like, yes, that’s what I have to do, so we’re getting closer. I think that, you know, marketing automation was a bag tag because I mean you’re not automating your marketing. Okay. It’s a set it, forget it. I plug it in. I don’t need to hire anybody else and you as a CEO here, right? Marketing automation, awesome. I don’t have to hire anybody. I plug this thing in. It’s going to run out of songs. The leads are coming like that. That’s what a CEO hears.

Josh Wagner: (34:02) Right. Then when we were talking about this before, like the opposite is true. You invest in a system like that more is more like you are absolutely, you need skill sets that you never had before. You need process you’ve probably never defined before and you think about your strategy in a way you probably never thought about it before. That moniker did a bad job of setting expectations, account based marketing. It’s marketing, it’s what sales has been doing since the beginning of time. These are the best companies that I want to go talk to and I’m going to come up with a plan to talk to them. Like that’s, that’s what it is. Right? So I think the focus on customer centricity is a good one in terms of like a macro trend and marketing. How the tech aligns to that. I mean, is that what we’re going to see is, is everyone going to be a customer marketing platform?

Josh Wagner: (34:52) Uh, you know, the upsell solution and this and that. I don’t know. Um, but I do think customer centricity is, is moving us down the right path in a lot of ways that you, you mentioned a lineman, we did some research late last year around sales and marketing alignment. And what are the things that make it good? What are the things that make it bad and then what does good actually mean? You know, I think everyone always thinks good as a feeling when good has to produce something to the business, right? So we created a matrix of good sales and marketing alignment actually yields pipeline growth. So on the new acquisition side and year over year revenue growth on the cross sell, upsell and expand side. So this is the definition of the matrix we created around sales and marketing alignment. And on the feelings side of it, marketing and sales generally had good things to say about one another.

Josh Wagner: (35:51) Like we respect the profession, they do this, they do that. Like it was a high lean in the positive side, right? But it turns out that good feelings alone or the feeling of alignment didn’t produce those results. What produced those results was [inaudible] those two organizations working together on a focus around the customer. They built their KPIs around the customer, they built their objectives around the customer, they built their, they budgeted around how they’re going to acquire and expand with customers. They can’t play their campaigns around the customer. So everything was very customer centric and that actually yielded, if you look at it in a magic quadrant to the upper right, wherever it wants to be. Whereas all the stuff that, one of the things that you would think of as as what, what, what does bad look like that an overly a heavier than the normal focus on technology laggards like way down at the bottom, you know. So those are some things that we talk about. You know, what does MarTech doing? What does it do well? What does it do poorly that just focus on the customer. Customer centricity is good. Focus on the tech without it being an enabler, rather it being the solution rather than an enabler of a solution is, is bad, right?

Josh Wagner: (37:09) You say this a lot, you’ve said several times, which is there’s no silver bullet, uh, with the pressure that many marketing teams, marketing leaders, sales teams are under. There’s a, I think there’s a tendency to want to deliver delivery to the promised land, right? To make you make your life easier or at least be the solution when the reality is you just hit on the head. It’s not a byproduct. It’s a servant of the solution. Be a part of it. Well, it’s funny, I, I, I did, uh, I was asked to speak at a sales enablement, a little mini show, uh, one in New York and one in San Francisco. And I titled the, the talk magic button, easy buttons, magic bullets and unicorns. Uh, and it was all about sales and marketing alignment is real. And it’s funny cause I basically the crux of the talk, I nothing to do with technology or anything like that.

Josh Wagner: (38:09) The crux of the talk was create a common language with your counterpart. Commit to what each other’s going to do, do it, and then check your ego at the door. Like those are the three things that I talked about and we’re not talking about rocket science here, right? This is basic human nature and how relationships are built and people came up and that like, Oh my God, this is so simple, but you’re so right and blow up. Okay. Sounds good. Just funny though, how we do get caught up in the, the swirl in the whirlwind of of what technology does a great job of selling us, right? They sell us that dream of something better, something easier, something that may not need quite as much elbow grease.

Josh Wagner: (38:52) They show us a report and they’re like, you too could have this report. They don’t show you all the work and in structure, language and alignment and all the things behind it, the guts to that report, the report, you’re like, Oh, I want that. That’s, that’s like looking at somebody that’s on stage at mr Olympia and you’re like, Hey, I want to, I want that body. Yeah. There’s a lot of work that went into that. Well, did you see my analogy on LinkedIn today, which was MarTech is the diet pill of B2B. Yeah. I mean the same thing, right? You watched the diet Coke commercial and you’re like, Aw man. All I gotta do is take the pills. Wait, it’s going to fall off. I’m going to be shredded. I’m going to look good in a snow suit. Like all that. Well, the reality is, yes, the diet pill with a sensible diet and exercise regimen can help produce these results.

Josh Wagner: (39:40) Marketing technology with a sensible go to market strategy can help produce these results. It’s the same concept, right? Like, yeah, absolutely. It could work. That’s awesome. All right, well I really appreciate you being on here before you, before we go, one last question being in being in marketing, being in, in sales, and given that there’s a huge buzz right now about the, the aging, the K Whopper ad, curious, I’m curious to know what’s your favorite advertisement and why? Oh man, this is very much on the spot. Uh, so I’m going to go back a ways and it’s not a, it’s not a TV ad. It was actually a print ad. So when I was in college, I had to, uh, I did, uh, I took a class on rhetoric and I wanted to, I want to do identifying something different that was actually, you know, being very rhetorical and rhetoric without saying anything.

Josh Wagner: (40:45) So there was this ad that Mercedes had an a magazine and there was a little kid, you know, kids and puppies are automatic, you know, wins in advertising are automatically depending on your audience. So the little kid sheets are down over the kid in bed, comfortable and safe. But the outline of the sheet had the Mercedes Benz logo. And I’m like, dude, you’re pulling it PR. I mean, how perfect is that, right? Safety, security family like all wrapped are under [inaudible], no car. And they add nothing. Just a Benz logo. Kids safely asleep in his bed and you’ll see the outline under the sheets. I thought that was brilliant. So what I love about that answer, Josh is, is that it doesn’t, if you’re in technology,

Kyle Hamer: (41:34) doesn’t matter if you’re in sales. Uh, what it shows is that there’s still a place for creativity and, and creating something meaningful for a company with, with imagery. And while many people think of advertising, first is what marketing is. It’s a byproduct of a lot of hard work by a lot of people behind closed doors to come up with that. It should be emotional. It should be. That’s exactly right. Yeah. Well, thanks for being on today. If somebody wants to, you know, connect with you or, or find out more about what you do, give us the ten second pitch on, on lead MD or 32nd pitch on elite MD and then how to get ahold of you.

Josh Wagner: (42:16) Yeah, I mean, we didn’t D as a marketing performance consultancy, our job is to break down the silos that I talked about between all the different organizations and look at marketing holistically, bringing all the components together that really drive performance marketing to help organizations not become the statistics. The statistics that say reads the, you know, 1% of marketing produced leads turned to revenue. The statistic that says most marketers can’t prove any sort of ROI on the technology spend. They have the statistic that says 84% of CMOs can’t produce a tangible ROI doc in their marketing efforts to other companies. That’s what we’re set out to do. I’m Josh Wagner, a Z on LinkedIn or Josh at [inaudible] dot com.

Kyle Hamer: (43:01) Awesome. Thanks for being on the show today, Josh. We’ve, uh, we’ve enjoyed talking about MarTech, the future technology and really practical ways to get bird what you got. Alright, thanks Carl.

Josh WagnerMarTech Guru - LeadMD

Josh started out like many sales professionals, cold calling! He knew early on there had to be a better way and adopted content marketing strategies to further his career. While honing his skills with basic email marketing tools and social strategies he found and fully embraced marketing automation as a way to fuel sales success. As a former client, LeadMD was there to help him build a better sales and marketing engine during his time as the Sales and Marketing Director for a Phoenix-based e-learning company. When not “bringing home the bacon” Josh loves to spend time with his wife and their 3 funny little humans. What time is leftover is spent throwing some weight around in his garage gym.